A typical urban household has a Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) line with multiple phone jacks. Often, one or more phone equipment is connected to these jacks. More recently, cordless phone manufacturers have started offering systems with multiple cordless phones attached to the same base. Thus, users have gotten accustomed to a degree of seamlessness offered by this in-home telephony system. Specifically, the user can pick up any phone equipment to initiate a call without distinguishing one piece of equipment from another. The user can change any phone equipment during the call with considerable ease. Moreover, users can join an ongoing call by picking up one or more phone devices in the home.
Considering the trend towards deployment of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) based services in the home, a similar degree of seamlessness as provided by the telephony system described earlier would be desired in the VoIP based environment. For this purpose, a terminal adapter has been introduced, which converts a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) phone into a Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Phone by connecting to the POTS phone and in-turn interworks with a SIP server through a broadband connection (provided by Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) or a cable system). This was the first generation of VoIP services.
In the next generation of VoIP services, it is predicted that numerous home devices will support VoIP natively. These could include, for example, software based VoIP clients (for example on home computers), desk-phones connected over Local Area Network (LAN) to the home network, cordless phone systems running on the home Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) system, dual-mode cellular-WLAN devices behaving as VoIP (over WLAN) and cable set top boxes with built-in WLAN clients.
Thus, there exists a need for a method and a system to reproduce an experience identical to either of the current in-home systems described earlier, for example multi-device cordless phone system or the system with multiple phones connected to multiple jacks in the home, in a VoIP serviced environment.